Murdoch Told Fox to Call Arizona Against Trump: 'Fuck Him.' Says New Michael Wolff Book

By Harry Siegel, The Daily Beast

09 July 21

Landslide offers some juicy gossip about the death rattle of a bizarre presidency, almost all of it attributed to anonymous sources.

here’s not much to Landslide, the desultory end of Michael Wolff’s Trump trilogy that began with Fire and Fury, a book that shocked and awed with gossipy revelations, largely provided by Steve Bannon, about the incompetence of his administration before that had been so widely recognized.

The new book, which The Daily Beast obtained a copy of ahead of its publication next week, is supposed to give an inside track of what happened as Trump’s presidency went off the rails in its final months, adding some insidery and usually vaguely sourced details to that well-documented disaster, as process was abandoned and a raving Trumpand a handful of his remaining henchpeople and true believers just made things up as they went.

It’s written in an omniscient third person that finds space for multiple mentions of Rudy Giuliani’s farts, and windily proclaims that “in the event that factual matters have been disputed, they have been included only if confirmed by multiple sources.” Which doesn’t sound so different from saying that the gossip only made it into print if two people shared the same story. Some of that gossip:

—Trump, at a meeting with Karl Rove at the beginning of the summer in 2020, as Joe Biden remained largely in his basement, told “Bush’s Brain” that “he had come to understand that the Democrats wanted him to attack Biden so as to weaken and destroy him. And then, when he had destroyed ‘Sleepy Joe’ as only Trump could, the Democrats’ plan, he had it on super-secret authority, was to replace Biden as the nominee” with Andrew Cuomo, adding “there is a very good chance that Michelle” Obama would then replace Kamala Harris on the Democratic ticket.

At the end of the meeting, Wolff writes, Rove asked where this crazy idea came from, and is told it’s from Fox News’ Sean Hannity. “POTUS believes it,” then-campaign manager Brad Parscale tells him. “If you could call Hannity and tell him to let up, that might be good.”

(Trump briefly returns to Cuomo in a rambling, raving interview with Wolff at Mar a Lago that concludes the book, with the ex-president saying that “Andrew is a thug,” while saying how surprised he is that Cuomo’s grip on power in New York appears to be slipping.)

—As to Cuomo’s old friend Chris Christie, Wolff reports that the final rift between him and Trump came at the last prep session before the first presidential debate, where the former New Jersey Governor, playing Biden, really rips into the president for the first time: “You have blood on your hands. You’re a complete failure. All these people have died from the virus. And it’s your fault.” It was a moment, Wolff writes, that “observers would judge in hindsight broke [Trump’s] relationship with his old crony”—not to mention that “Trump blamed getting COVID on Chris Christie… [who] had sat across from him at the debate prep table, and Trump had seen the spittle come out of his mouth and tried to duck from the droplets.”

(In the Mar a Lago interview, Trump says of Christie: “I helped him out a lot with his problems, and he turned out to be a very disloyal guy—and he had big problems. He’s not going anywhere.”)

—According to Wolff, who as usual does not cite his sources, it was Fox News CEO Lachlan Murdoch, with his father Rupert’s backing, who made the decision to call Arizona for Biden on election night, pulling the rug out from under Trump. According to Wolff, Fox News’ independent election desk operation “was merely cover…to bypass the news desk and be directly answerable to the Murdochs. Certainly, there was every reason, if you wanted a reason to delay the Arizona call, to yet forestall it and still have no fear of being preempted by anyone else. Lachlan got his father on the phone to ask if he wanted to make the early call. His father, with signature grunt, assented, adding: ‘Fuck him.’”

Fox News didn’t return a request for comment from the Beast on Friday about Wolff’s depiction of the election night events.

Later, Wolff quotes Fox News boss Roger Ailes, who died in 2017, saying after a debate practice session in 2016 that “Rudy is Rudy, and Donald is Donald, and together that’s an equation which adds up to a loss of contact with most other rational people, if not reality itself.”

—Speaking of Rudy, Wolff reports that after Maria Ryan, who Giulani has called his “good friend” and Wolff describes as his “girlfriend,” emailed a Trump aide that he would charge $20,000 a day to fight the election results—an ask that was promptly leaked to The New York Times and that “America’s mayor” fiercely denied, leading the aide she’d emailed to ask her how it felt to have her boyfriend call her a liar in the paper of record—Trump flatly told Giuliani he would be paid only for a win.

Later, Wolff writes, as Giuliani and “constitutional lawyer” Jenna Ellis held bootleg meetings with Trumpist state lawmakers to try and get them to overturn their election results, Ryan, who travelled with him, put in “an invoice to the Trump campaign for her services. The remaining campaign officials would take some pleasure in refusing to pay it and in conveying to a very sour president that Rudy’s girlfriend had put in for her fees.”

—As then-Attorney General William Barr separated himself from Trump’s attempts to overturn the election he lost, Wolff writes, “Trump had been personally calling around to various U.S. attorneys in swing state districts, among them his appointee William McSwain in the Easter District of Pennsylvania” to try and convince them to open their own probes. When they did not, Trump blamed his A.G., saying that “if I had won, Barr would have licked the floor if I asked him to. What a phony!”

—When the Supreme Court rejected the lawsuit Texas originated trying to challenge the results in other states, ruling that the plaintiffs lacked standing, Trump was furious at “his” three Supreme Court justices, according to Wolff, with most of the president’s bile spent on Brett Kavanaugh, who Trump said he hadn’t wanted to appoint while growling, “Where would he be be without me? I saved his life. He wouldn’t even be in a law firm. Who would have had him? Nobody. Totally disgraced. Only I saved him.” In his interview with Wolff, Trump added, “I’m very disappointed in Kavanaugh… he just hasn’t had the courage you need to be a great justice.”

Everyone Wants Health Care Reform. Industry Lobbying Won't Let Them Have It.

By Luke Savage, Jacobin

09 July 21

It’s often said that politicians pander to polls. Not so for health care: despite repeated lopsided majorities in polls favoring a public system, leaders in both parties don’t seem to care.

ate last month, a poll conducted by Morning Consult and Politico gauged Americans’ opinions on several health care measures expected to be included in the Democrats’ forthcoming reconciliation bill. Its conclusions were striking: of the six proposed reforms put to respondents, each enjoyed majority support across the electorate with four even eliciting more than 50 percent from Republican voters.

A proposal to add dental, vision, and hearing coverage to Medicare, for example, scored 84 percent in favor (89 percent among Democrats; 79 percent among Republicans). Even less resoundingly popular items like lowering the eligibility age of Medicare to sixty still boasted high levels of support (61 percent overall, with 49 percent of Republican voters in favor).

In other words, there’s considerable buy-in for each proposal across the political spectrum. Why, then, does it seem so hard to imagine any actually passing into law?

At surface, the answer mostly has to do with the confusing and labyrinthine process now unfolding as the White House pursues a bipartisan infrastructure bill alongside another containing the few of things Democrats nominally promised to do if given a mandate. As is typically (and predictably) the case, proposals related to health care, education, and climate change have been relegated to the reconciliation bill even though many are quite popular. Almost by definition given the Democrats’ razor-thin majority and consistently demonstrated ambivalence about digging in around their own stated agenda, this means that measures like those recently polled by Morning Consult/Politico look vastly more precarious than those in the bipartisan infrastructure plan — ironic given their support among voters from both parties.

It’s a dynamic all too familiar to Washington, where the most popular and commonsensical policies tend to be given short shrift while things absolutely no one was asking for (see: “asset recycling”) are the basis for “consensus.”

Indeed, whatever the received wisdom might be about politicians putting polls over principle, it’s breathtaking how out of step with majority opinion the leaderships of the two parties often are. The most obvious and topical example is Medicare For All, which has enjoyed widespread support for years but was near-universally opposed by candidates in the 2020 Democratic primaries and can barely even get a hearing in DC.

The compromise was ostensibly a public option, the alternative embraced by Joe Biden which has tellingly received little mention since he actually took office. It’s now July, and the suite of proposals being discussed is mostly limited to a handful of Medicare reforms, packed into a reconciliation bill with an arguably negligible chance of success despite their overwhelming popularity among Democrats and Republicans alike.

The lesson in all of this is that the inner workings of Beltway lawmaking often operate independently of public opinion: the interests which shape and control the legislative process being able to do so without having to worry much about what the majority wants or thinks. Here, the Medicare reforms currently slated to appear in the Democrats’ reconciliation bill are a good case in point.

Having helped to push Biden’s proposed public option to the sidelines, and more recently spent unfathomable sums to defeat a local version of the idea in Colorado, the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future (PAHCF) — a front for various corporate health care interests including the private insurance racket and Big Pharma — is now working to stop Congress from lowering the age of eligibility for Medicare to sixty. To this end, it’s released a fearmongering report filled with deficit alarmism and taken out a seven-figure ad buy to discredit the idea. While the group, which has extensive ties to the Democratic Party, is not required to disclose donor information, an April report from the Intercept pegged the value of a single contribution from corporate leviathan CVS Health at $5 million.

It’s just one small illustration of the scale on which private interests operate, and the bottomless reserve of cash many have at their disposal to ensure that even modest and popular reforms stand little chance of success in Congress. By way of comparison, PAHCF’s official Facebook page has fewer than thirty-five hundred followers and its daily posts receive little to no engagement. Its Twitter feed is exactly the same, the few replies that it does receive consistently being from people hostile to its mission.

Though it’s admittedly a less than scientific way of measuring things, the spectacle of a multimillion dollar corporate lobbying effort unable to muster even the most perfunctory engagement on social media is a pretty potent metaphor about how America’s lawmaking process typically works. It’s pretty hard to fake grassroots enthusiasm or popular buy-in, especially when the objective is to prevent millions of people from getting things they both urgently want and desperately need.

The point is, with enough cash and lobbying power at your disposal, you don’t have to. Through astroturfed PR offensives, campaign donations, and the various privileges now afforded to dark money by America’s Wild West political financing regime, public opinion can be treated as basically irrelevant — even, and especially, when explicit promises have been made and a clear majority wants something that will imperil industry profiteers’ balance sheets.